Housekeeping

A friend coming around for supper, somebody who notices dust.

 

So I have dusted and swept the floors and washed down surfaces and wiped mirrors and shooed the puppies outside. Brought in fresh flowers, canna lilies and strelitzias, polished silver and glass. It ooks perfect to my uncritical eyes. Except that one puppy has carried in a large dripping papaya and there is a trail of shiny pulpy black seeds across the living room carpet. The other puppy has climbed into a large white ceramic bowl on the table and is sitting looking puzzled, with her silky ears pinned back.

 

My friend is the fastidious type who does not allow her cat on the furniture. Personally I think a small fat puppy in an ornamental bowl on a clean table looks damn cute, but that is me. And last night she chewed up the television remote viewer, so we are stuck for canned entertainment. Not a bad thing.

Of course by the time the guest arrives at the front door with smiles and a growling tummy, the pups will have reduced the house to its usual state of chaos. The truly houseproud of this world tend not to have pets or children.

But for now the surfaces are gleaming and the upholstery nicely brushed and the carpet less of a swamp, so I feel very happy and virtuous. Una is much better today, on antibiotics again but more cheerful. She has bought a brown seed loaf for the smoked salmon.

 

‘Why is that dog sitting in the white bowl you bought in London because you thought it was Spode and it turned out to be Marks & Spencers circa 1996?’ she asks. ‘You kept insisting it was apple-white china but that was just the green gloom of the shop. Are you teaching the dog to be an object of beauty and a joy for ever?’

 

The dog sits in the bowl with the look of a dowager who is not sure she put on panties this morning. Such a sweet dog. Now I must go and plunge slivers of garlic and rosemary into the lamb.

 

Stay sober sweet readers.

Music, sweet heartbreak

 

To be caught off guard is perhaps one of the greatest charms and terrors of reading.

 

I have been reading a review on the history of the crazy Wittgenstein family, thinking as I read, about the way in which Wittgenstein’s emphasis on what language could not say shaped my thinking so many years ago. When I came on a reviewer in the New Yorker who placed everything in the context of music and wrote this:

 

‘Pages from the Wittgenstein collection of autographed musical manuscripts flutter through this wonderfully told story. Scores by Brahms, Schubert, Wagner, and Bruckner are stuffed in a potting shed by a quick-thinking servant while an art historian from the Gestapo rummages through Gretl’s house. A Bach cantata, two Mozart piano concertos, a Haydn symphony, and one of Beethoven’s last piano sonatas are smuggled to Ludwig in Cambridge, where he places them in a bank safe-deposit box. Gretl’s younger son hides Schubert’s “Die Forelle,” Brahms’s “Handel Variations,” some Beethoven letters, Wagner’s sketches for “Die Walküre,” and more, under a pile of socks in his suitcase, and heads for the Vienna railway station. Music was also, Waugh writes, the only effective way in which the Wittgenstein children could communicate with their shy, nervous, and intensely musical mother.

And music provided consolation and distraction from the tragedies of the family, about which they were mostly required to remain silent.’

How music has been the great hidden leitmotif of my life! Whenever I think of my mother, there is Mahler playing in the next room. Once last year, at a dinner party with friends in the music-loving village of Presteigne, I was asked by my host which Mahler symphony I preferred.

 

I was unable to answer. The man with me, kind if not charitable (if that makes sense), assumed I had forgotten all about Mahler (or never known the works), and jovially tried to change the subject. I was struck dumb by anguish and an immensity of longing to speak, the impossibility of speaking. I do not ‘enjoy’ Mahler; Mahler afflicts me like too-recent tragedy, like too much beauty all at once; like a mother dying.

Procrastinating on Monday

It is a cloudy and warm morning and I am wondering how to cut back the wild and thorny bougainvillea outside my bedroom window. The brackets are a rich burgundy tipped with copper and the branches tap urgent messages in Morse code on my windows all through windy nights. I am not sleeping well, and so the bougainvillea must be pruned and trained away from the window sill.

 

Una has to go back to the doctor for scans of her abdominal cavity and swollen leg. I feel very anxious and am trying not to show it.

My much-loved friend J called me from the UK and I talked a little about my father, still in a coma in the rehab ward of a care facility in Hawaii. I have no contact, and no contact is possible. But everything remains unfinished — I do wonder if he cannot let go and die because his life is such a tangle of secret abuse and violent compulsions and if somehow he needs closure even though he is lying unconscious. We know so little about semi-vegetative states. I send him release, the freedom to go, my forgiveness — but the real war, as with each of us, is with ourselves.

And there is work waiting on my desk as I fill the water bowls for the pups, browse international news, look up recipes for slow-roast lamb. It is my friend Charlotte’s birthday and she will come to us for supper tomorrow so I am making her favourite dishes. I must soak raisins and char-grill zucchini and eggplant, pound chillies and garlic and ginger, crush peppercorns. The table grapes are wonderful at this time of year.

 

As I move around the kitchen, I check locked doors and the gates to the backyard. There is a gang of armed men, mostly youngsters who have failed school, robbing houses and assaulting lone women in this area. Guns are cheaper than a new set of clothes in this part of the world.

 

Years ago I did a criminology project on firearm homicides. After that I decided never to own a gun. Unless somebody has been extensively trained in the responsible use of firearms and has seen what bullets do to the human body, I don’t think he or she should go out and buy a gun. One of my earliest memories is of being taught to fire an FN rifle on a rifle range in Kenya, where it was legal to kill other human beings  in defence of property. I remember the noise of the rifles firing, that explosive percussion in my ear, the jolting against my shoulder, and how when I ran to pick up the cartridge it sizzled molten in my fingers. The buzz of dangerous new emotions came up in me like a swarm of bees.

I am not being contentious here. The Catholic church has a long and well-developed understanding on ‘just war’ and restraints governing self-defence, but Christian beliefs have not tended to stop frightened or outraged people from arming themselves — and then finding it hard to live with the knowledge of oneself as somebody who has ended another’s life, or participated in makeshift vigilante squads or militias that destroy more than they protect. Living in South Africa has taught me how to live with unsafety and violence, and the violence within myself. Others are shocked and dismayed to find themselves shouting at shop assistants or slapping their own children or swearing at a stranger in a crowded place. Some of us would not be surprised to wake one morning and find ourselves mass murderers for all our church-going and do-gooding and memorising passages of the BB or the Bible. But others still think they are able to go out and buy a bright new shiny revolver and keep it in a locked cabinet beside the bed and that it will not change them, that they will not be tempted to kill. They are innocent of the human heart, the war within.

Letter to a secular friend

Dear C–

You ask about my belief in a Higher Power and wonder if I mind being asked.

Not impolite at all, now that I  feel I know you better and understand where such a question would be coming from — but it is not a simple answer. I am very attached to the Big Book Appendix II, 4th Edition. The educational and incremental or gradual nature of change and maturing is very true in my case. No sudden white light!

I would say I am agnostic — I don’t know that it is possible for many of us to ‘believe’ in the ways in which past generations were able to believe. But I have great respect for mystery. The writer of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, puts it best:

“So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous.”

 

Because the notion of a Higher Power is so exclusively AA and foreign to most people who like yourself do not know anything of AA, I am not going to go into that very much except to say that I come from a more communitarian society than you find in the West and for me the strength of communal vision, sharing and healing, the collective energy of a group working together, is probably all the Higher Power I need for now.

 

Alcoholism ‘bankrupted’ me in most respects and obliterated many developmental aspects of growth, emotionally, intrapsychically and spiritually, and I am very slowly finding my feet again and reconstructing my beliefs and understandings together in relationship with others doing the same thing. I expect my beliefs and ethics to evolve and change over time. I am still very new in sobriety.

With love & respect

Mary

 

xxMary

Lack of discretion

Such a lazy somnolent afternoon with bees crashing into dried lavender stalks and flies hobbled by glass, slow sun stretching itself out on the lawn.

 

My friend Marilyn came by. She wanted to know all about my vegan supper, which was not an unmitigated success. I had forgotten Marilyn is an ardent vegetarian and food purist.

 

‘Is that dog food I smell?’ she asked, frowning and wrinkling her nose as she came into the kitchen.

 

‘No,’ I said happily. ‘It is oxtail for our supper turning all glutinous.’

 

When it comes to tact around offal, I am what the Irish call a complete feckin’ idiot.

‘But it snt really the poor thing’s tail is it?’ asked mrilyn in dismay. ’It is like a part of leg, isn’t it? Tail is just so gross.’

‘Not done with a small quill of cinnamon and paprika and stock and a bay leaf, not gross at all. Very mucilaginous, because everything kind of melts down and you can feed 12 people on just a few chunks.’

 

Then unfortunately, I realised it was time to change the subject and began talking about haggis made with pinhead oats and a rinsed sheep’s intestine. Marilyn became very quiet and stern and for all my vigorous self-policing I could not seem to shut up. I like to defend cheap cuts of meat, but this was bad timing. She is a city girl and fond of scrubbed butter lettuce and tofu burgers and health shakes with soy milk. Oh, I do love vegetables, but I am also a raw farm hick  who likes to watch a smiling Nigel Slater on BBC Food stuffing bulky sheep hearts with parsley and breadcrumbs.

 

When I sobered up, I thought this kind of running away with myself in chattering gambits would just not happen anymore. Sadly, it was not just the alcohol talking. It was veritas without vino.

 

I gave the repelled Marilyn some penitential grapes and stopped just short of inviting her to supper. She fled up the road and I may not see her for a while. My oxtail now smells delicious but forbidden, like a sweaty footballer with unwashed socks. How scrumptious.

The village alcoholic

Glorious weather and my neighbour has just popped in to see if my lemons are ripe because he and his wife are making quince jelly. Homemade quince jellies are on sale and being handed around as gifts to all and sundry at this time of year. A surfeit of quince jellies. My neighbour stood under the lemon tree and we both speculated on how long it will take for my lemons to ripen. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Do you think I am drinking too much? As an alcoholic I thought you might know. I have been knocking them back at the golf club quite a bit lately and I feel a bit off in the morning. What do you think?’ ‘Recovering alcoholic,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a clue. If it feels like a problem for you, it may be a problem.’ ‘Oh good,’ he said ‘You don’t think I’ll be passing out on the golf course then?’ ‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘But I wouldn’t know. The only drinking I can comment on is my own. But if you feel there may be a problem, I would cut back for a while and see if the problem clears up. If it doesn’t clear up, you might want to talk to a doctor or do some reading or something.’ ‘Are you always this vague?’ he asked. I shall stick to recipes for quince jelly. My puppy is much better this morning and tearing around like a demon.

The allure of striped figs

‘I don’t know why I feel so queasy and unwell,’ I said to my housemate last night after finishing a bowl of thin chicken soup.

 

‘You ate 22 striped figs in one sitting,’ said the housemate in a matter-of-fact voice.

 

Well, not 22, not that many. But a surfeit of figs is probably the cause of illness. And my puppy Chloe, the little white dishcloth, is also unwell and has an upset tummy. We are both on a diet of toast and water.

 

But my neighbour Tienie grows rare figs  from cuttings taken on the island of Capri and old gardens in Smyrna and Istanbul. The figs are luscious and syrupy and very very rich. There are figs white as ivory, almost black inside with purple juices, light golden figs that resemble greengages, gold and brown speckled figs and the delectable green-and-white stripey figs that taste of sticky nuts and honey. I eat them with thick Greek yoghurt or creme fraiche or just by themselves in a small bowl. Then I suffer.

But the great pleasure of being sick and convalescing in bed with a glass of water and open windows and crisp fresh sheets is the time for just reading, rereading old favourites, light reading, skimming the pages to find what happens next, or simply reading the same paragraph over ad over again.

 

There are books I love to read only when I am sick in bed with time on my hands: Stevie Smith Novel on Yellow Paper; Elizabeth David on the history of ice and refrigeration; the Letters of Elizabeth Bishop; Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson; the short stories of Chekov; the poems of Mary Oliver and George Herbert and Rumi; and the novels of William Maxwell, who said when he was 82, in a last interview:

 

“`I think it is somehow unimaginative to consider the universe as the product of chance,’ William Maxwell told me. He paused a moment, looked over his tortoise shell glasses, and then continued to type: `I am inclined to say that it is the product of God knows. The evidence offered in Nature is so astonishing and so consistently on the side of an Intention. I did not escape the influence of seven or eight years of Sunday School, and believe we ought to help each other when it is possible, that the self-centered life is a kind of living death, that life on any terms is a privilege and that we ought to be grateful for it and use it to our best ability, and not be frightened or frantic when we reach the end of it. But instead stand, accepting, like a flower that has gone to seed.’

Sick in bed

Woke up feverish and nauseous, got up but felt giddy and unwell, so decided to go back to bed and read a very old Helen McInnes thriller and sleep.

 

Una arrived back and took my blood pressure, my blood sugar and gave me a small white pill to ward off nausea, put the puppies on the bed, poured me orange juice and went off again, saying there is not much wrong but I should stay in bed for the day. Now I am nausea-free so I am eating a large triangle of blue Roquefort cheese and taking it easy. In my novel Richard and Frances have just arrived in Innsbruck in 1939 and there are brown-shirted troopers everywhere. Everyone in the book is either intrepid and resourceful or evil, cunning but stupid. Very restful. I wish Richard and Frances would stop smoking so much.

 

Tomorrow I shall post something less invalidish.

Mist burning off the fields

Yesterday I read obituaries  and tributes for Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, who killed himself a few days ago, aged 47. He suffered from severe depression and had spent much of his adult life as a fisheries biologist in Alaska. I don’t know if the depression was inherited from his mother, who killed herself in 1963, leaving behind the brilliant and controversial collection of poems published as Ariel. I think that the suicide of a parent, even unremembered, is a difficult legacy to live with — for Nicholas, it was echoed by the suicide of his step-mother Assia Wevill and  when he was five years old. Assia, in despair at Ted Hughes’ refusal to commit himself to her, killed both herself and her small child Shura. We understand so little about suicidal ideation, or the forces and trajectories leading to that choice of death over life, that it is not worth speculating about. I am highly reactive to reports of suicide because of my mother and try to give this obssessive notion some reflective space while not encouraging the prurient interest. So sad –

 

For years I thought of Ted Hughes as deeply misogynist and sadistic, chronically unfaithful and somebody who blocked readers’ access to the unpublished work of Plath, her letters and diaries, while profiting from her posthumous success. Something of a vampire.

 

Then some years ago, I opened the Guardian Review and read Hughes’ poems for Sylvia in the very tender and regretful anthology entitled Birthday Letters. I had misjudged him, in part as women of my generation were prone to misjudge men, and I reread Hughes with  a new openness and admiration.

Honesty. Openmindedness. Willingness. So hard to maintain these attitudes, to reshape ways of habituated and calcified thinking, a closedness that once seemed final and restful. Now in early sobriety, I struggle with receptivity, to listen and stay with the discomfort of new ideas and experiences and ways of interpreting experience. To allow the aging self to become more flexible, fluid, unruly, to be moulded anew, to begin again. All very invigorating in some respects –

And my dear unsober friend Karin called me early this morning to say she is utterly depressed and at a loss. She feels she is coming to the end of her tether. She does not know how to go on.

 

‘Is it hurting badly enough for you to want to stop drinking?’ I asked a little awkwardly, hearing the slurred and unhappy little voice at 6am.

 

Good God, no! ‘ she shot back at me. ‘Anything but that.’

 

So there we go. She is thinking of buying herself a secondhand DIY electrolysis machine on the blackmarket so that she can remove stubborn hairs from her chin and upper lip that make her feel old before her time. I wince at the thought of merry drunken escapades with electrified needles and unsteady hands. And the Fool’s lines from King Lear come back to me as I tweezer out my own stubborn and unwanted hairs in front of the bathroom mirror: ‘You should not have grown old before you had grown wise.’ Ouch.

Tuesday moving along

Still battling to post but nothing to drink over, as we like to say out in the boondocks.

 

My unsober friend Karin and I went to help out a gardener trying to get greenery to grow on the shores of a nearby dam, a landscape clotted with acacia thorn trees and wild kikuyu grass and some kind of gorse. I chatted to the gardener about putting in  tough indigenous bushes which can thrive in the poor soil and heat-glazed winds coming off the dam. Karin stood some distance away at the water’s edge in painful reverie and smoked. She had a ‘migraine’. Not a real medically certified blockbuster of a migraine, but one of those migraines that come in useful because you can’t pronounce the word ‘hangover’.

The gardener Dawid and myself talked about strelitzias and euryops daisies and plumbago, and gestured and waved our hands about and planned what might go where and what would be nibbled by buck. Karin, who had in fact set up the meeting with Dawid, stood swaying in the breeze a  few metres away.

We said goodbye to Dawid and started back  along the dam shore in Karin’s dented BMW. Suddenly she braked sharply and swung off the dirt road.

‘Look,’ she cried out, in a happy trembly voice like a faithful prophet granted his vision of the Promised Land. ‘There is the clubhouse and they sell ice at the clubhouse from 11am onwards. I must have some ice.’

 

‘Ice’ like ‘migraine’ is a euphemism for the hair of the dog. I felt very irritable but figured that if I was there she wouldn’t have more than a couple of drinks and I could get her back into the car and homeward bound.

 

But the bar of the clubhouse was closed. I was very thankful. Karin came back to the car and began to weep, dabbing at her eyes behind the dark glasses. I said to her very gently that it would not take us long to get back to the village and she could have a drink at home. She glared at me.

 

This is not about needing to have a drink at all,’ she said with hauteur. ‘How little you know me! My life is a bottomless pit and I barely survive from day to day. Drinking just helps me to put a brave face on things, that is what people like you fail to understand. I am not like you Mary, I was born  without a protective hide. I am much too sensitive for this world.’

The querelous, defensive and endlessly aggrieved voice of active alcoholism! That exceptional rare sensitivity scraped raw by the brutal facts of life and needing to be doused in strong spirits for ever after! I know it as well as I know the back of my hand. Alcoholic, c’est moi!